“But Fift,” Squell said, reaching across and taking zir hand, “I am a Vail. I’m meant to range around, to protect and enliven, to gambol and delight, to fight and feel—to encircle the center that holds and is!”

Fift looked away.

(Vvonda stood straight, towering above Hrotrun. If ve was surprised that Hrotrun was already here, ready for them, with friends, ve was trying not to show it. “We’re here,” ve began, too loud, clenching one fist and then the other, “to issue a formal challenge—”)

“And to be a Staid or a Vail,” Squell said, “is to be something real, Fift, something that has a meaning and a . . . a richness. But to fall between the cracks is just to get lost, I really believe it!” The tears were flowing now, laying shining tracks on vir face.

{And now, probably for the next hour or two}, Dobroc had written, {I will be sitting and thinking of you and of Abador and Minth! How foolish!}

Fift couldn’t stand it anymore, sitting passive next to Squell’s humiliating earnestness, and the implication that ze . . . that these things ze felt for Shria meant that ze . . . and zir other Fathers staring at their soup in the breakfast room, pretending not to hear every word . . . and following zir Mother numbly through the crowds of Undersnort . . . ! Ze couldn’t bolt from the bed—zir legs were heavy, feet glued to the floor—but ze had to do something. Ze couldn’t stand another moment of this.

The body in the anteroom was the only option. Ze went out the apartment’s front door, onto the pathways on the surface of Foo.

There was something strange about Dobroc’s message, something that didn’t synchronize . . . something it wasn’t saying out loud. Abador and Minth? Ze’d just been thinking of that very responsum.

On the other side of Foo, Dobroc was walking. Ze was a dark, leathery Staid with a thick unruly shock of black hair and some kind of complex skinwork. Ze had a self-confident but abstracted air. Ze looked up, squinted, nodded to zirself, and disappeared into one of the access tunnels that led down into the heart of Foo.

Of course, Dobroc could tell Fift was in zir audience, which was suddenly embarrassing; Fift pulled zir attention away.

(“—found you!” Vvonda cried. “You can’t refuse us! Tell them, Shria!”

(Shria was bouncing from one foot to the other, vir hands held in front of vem. “We’re taking this to the mats where it belongs, Hrotrun. We’ve got”—ve flushed with pride—“we’ve got preliminary approval from a mat room in Izist. They consider the quarrel legitimate enough! As long as—”

(Bluey, lips tight, vir opal eyes intense, nodding and glaring at Hrotrun. Stogma, grinning, white teeth showing in vir broad, pleasant dark-blue face . . . )